I know earthquake is measured by Rictor scale but how do they know where to keep the scale in advance. Before, a quake coming up, how do they know that this place is likely to have quake in certain time and they keep one over there to measure? Is it random that they keep?
In: Physics
1. The Richter Scale is not an actual physical measuring device. It’s just a system for ranking how strong Earthquakes are. It’s like the Scoville Heat Scale for ranking spicy foods or the “Celsius” and “Fahrenheit” scales for temperature. The Richter Scale is a set of numbers used to communicate earthquake strength. It does not **do** the measuring; there is no device called a “Richter Scale”.
2. The device that measures earthquake shaking is called a seismograph. There’s a [network of them all around the world](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226172456/figure/fig11/AS:668281950199825@1536342241593/Map-of-station-locations-of-the-Global-Seismographic-Network-that-monitors-worldwide.ppm), all running and recording nonstop 24/7. The great thing about that is you don’t actually need one at the site of an earthquake! We know how fast the shaking travels, and how much it decreases with distance. So when there’s an Earthquake, you can just compare measurements from a few of these stations. Since you know when it hit each station and how strong it was when it got there, there’s math to work out exactly where the shaking came from and how strong it was when it left. This process is called *triangulation* if you want to search more details.
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